Genrad FutureData

Hey, Don't know if you are still interested in info about the GenRad Futuredata 2300 but I spent a long time in front of one and still have access to it for (very) occasional support. We bought it in 1980 and used it to develop a MagCard debit system based on the 8085. Used it for 6 years before transitioning to a PC environment. Observations: Extremely slick. RDOS II was spectacular for what it was intended for. Assembly, linking and loading always went without a hitch. Ours had a whopping 48K, 2 x 128K 8" Shugart drives and all the emulator stuff. You could buy memory to take it past 48K but it only gave you a few more K since RDOS II had to live in the upper memory. We did not use the emu too much as we had a resident monitor that was specifically tailored to debugging what we had to do. I did incorporate a PAL into a new design and when I discovered that all the PAL cross-compiler stuff ran on PDPs and other expensive machines that I did not have access to, wrote a PAL cross compiler that ran under RDOS II that drove a ProLog blaster to get us through. This was in 1981. All in all, a fantastic system. Even with the PC onslaught, it took a 486/33 with a HDD to finally beat the assembly/link speeds of that sorry, floppy-based FutureData unit. I returned to school after all this to complete the degree in computer science and was appalled at the sorry algorithms presented in the lower division. The FutureData used full track buffering, double hashing and more to make the most of limited hardware resources. Different than the current crop of VBASIC hacks. *sigh* As an aside. Back in those days, Intel, National and others sold their chips with the development systems (Intellec, StarLink etc.l) like a hook. Once you had put $20K into the development system (sometimes rack mounted!) they figured they could hose you on their single board computers etc. at whatever cost. With the GenRad, we could listen to them say how much more expensive it would be to move to the next board and then watch them crater when we told them that for less than $1K we could completely re-tool our development hardware and .. would have! Heady times, for sure. RJO